Just over a week ago a number of blogs presented us with Hotelicopter, the world’s first flying hotel, featuring a modified Soviet helicopter decked out to create a five-star aerial resort. Of course, this turned out to be a total hoax in honor of April Fools day (albeit an early one) – Hotelicopter is in fact a web startup, and it launches today to the public.
Hotelicopter is a new hotel booking site that allows users to search across 30 travel sites for rooms at over 150,000 hotels. The site is also notable for being the first such hotel aggregator to include Facebook Connect integration, which it can use to power social hotel recommendations and to also let your friends know where you’re staying.
The site has a clean interface, allowing users to use sliding bars to narrow down their search results by price, star rating (based on reviews from TripAdvisor), and checkboxes for amenities you might want (internet access, included breakfast, etc). Prices are clearly noted next to rooms, and users can directly book their rooms without having to jump through other hoops.
All in all, it seems to work well, but there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot distinguishing Hotelicopter from other sites like Kayak. That said, the people behind Hotelicopter clearly have a good sense of humor (and marketing), so they may be able to make a name for themselves in the crowded space.
Reminds me of the Roflcopter
Thanks so much for the mention!
– Lauren Blackwell and the hotelicopter team
Doesn’t Kayak already do this? It seems like this is just kayak’s affiliate program with some CSS and a facebook connect widget. The product doesn’t seem too interesting.
Love the April Fools stunt though.
Great strategy
Wouldn’t roomreservations.com be a better domain for them?
It’s not actually a NEW site, it is just a new name for VibeAgent.com, which has been around for a while.
yup. And I must say, I like “hotelicopter” as a brand much better than “VibeAgent”.
As for why not “roomreservations” (above), well, I suppose thats just an aspect of literal vs. playful branding — for instance why is Amazon.com is not “booksandstuff.com”
. Either approach works for me…
Greg
They have a killer set of hotel listings worldwide and they mave matched or beat any prices I have seen elsewhere.
Hmmm…I can read the headlines now “The worlds first hotelicopter.com crash!
Great application. It’s very easy to get a hotel
There are quite many of these meta search engines for hotels now – all reinventing the wheel – so the ones that will survive need to stand out in other ways. Hats off for a great rebrand / marketing launch.
The hotel price aggregators have actually made very good progress. I know someone that has worked on a small project for one – it’s a lot harder to sort out then flight meta search.